“I think lullabies are, in a way, arguably in a separate class because (a) they’re functional; they’re for calming someone else. They’re not for calming you. And (b) they have a formulaic pattern. David Huron mentions this, where it’s a big leap and then a slow descent down and the idea is that you grab the attention and then you decrease arousal. And so there’s sort of a melodic pattern to lullabies that puts them in a class by themselves.
“And almost any lullaby fits that melodic pattern. In my undergraduate music cognition class I ask—because it’s a very international group of students—‘Sing your first lullaby that comes to mind’ and they all fit that rule. There is none that I’ve come across that doesn’t fit. [Sings Brahms’ lullaby: da da dee, da da dee, da da DEE da da da dah] There it is, on the ninth note, the large leap. And then stepwise motion from there.”
Music theorist Ian Cross disagrees that lullabies are only for comforting the infant. “First-time mothers experience a great deal of uncertainty and apprehension about their newborns. ‘What do I do with this?’ ” Singing mutually calms the mother and child. Because it requires regular, rhythmic breathing, it can serve as a kind of meditation for the mother. The slow, steady rhythms of singing lullabies can stabilize respiration, and also heart rate, lower the pulse, and cause muscle relaxation.
Another and perhaps not obvious form of comforting music is music made for the disaffected and disenfranchised. Teenagers who feel misunderstood, cut off, and alone find allies in lyricists who sing of similar alienation. In affluent societies around the world, so many teenagers feel as though they don’t fit in, that they’re not among the cool; they feel lonesome and alone. These function as bonding and friendship songs, for sure, and simultaneously as comfort songs. In the seventies, some of us listened to musicians who sang about things that were not discussed—free sex, smoking cigarettes or marijuana out in back of the school (think Brownsville Station and “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” or the Animals and “Tobacco Road”). The implicit message of these songs was “You’re one of us—you’re not alone—the things you think and feel are normal.” Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” addressed the millions of teenage girls (and boys) who felt they didn’t fit in because they were not attractive enough:To those of us who knew the pain
Of valentines that never came
And those whose names were never called
When choosing sides for basketball
It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
And dreams were all they gave for free
To ugly duckling girls like me.
In the eighties and nineties, Michael Stipe with R.E.M. and Morrissey (first with the Smiths and then as a solo artist) reached millions of listeners with their songs of depression, alienation, and detachment.
Today when high schoolers feel misunderstood they listen to hip-hop and rap and lyrics such as “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio:I’m living life do or die, what can I say?
I’m twenty-three now but will I live to see twenty-four
The way things is going I don’t know.
Some comfort songs are refrains, intended to calm us in the face of danger, or soothe us when facing death (either our own, or the death of a close one). In “Death Is Not the End,” Bob Dylan creates a simultaneously anthemic and anesthetic refrain: “When you’re sad and lonely and you haven’t got a friend, just remember that death is not the end . . . When the cities are on fire, with the burning flesh of men, just remember that death is not the end.” As with many songs, the lyrical intent is ambiguous. Is Dylan singing to someone who has just lost a friend, telling her that the friend is not really dead? Or is he suggesting the recipient of the song might consider suicide? Either way, the message that death is just a portal, not the end, and you will live on afterward, is more comforting than the alternative, that death ends everything definitively.
David Byrne described three songs that he reaches for when he feels he needs comfort, or in his words, “consoling”: “I Don’t Wanna Talk About It Now,” “Michelangelo,” and “Boulder to Birmingham,” all written by Emmylou Harris, whose voice Rodney Crowell describes as “equal parts siren and Earth angel—the embodiment of the feminine, the voice you’d want to take to the oft mentioned deserted island.” (“Boulder” was cowritten by Bill Danoff, who wrote “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the John Denver hit, and “Afternoon Delight,” a hit for the Starland Vocal Band.)
I don’t want to hear a love song, I got on this airplane just to fly
And I know there’s life below
But all that it can show me is the prairie and the sky
“ ‘Boulder to Birmingham’ is the one she did with Gram Parsons. Somebody beautifully pouring out some pain but not just screaming out like they hit their thumb with a hammer. Pain, but in a much more slow, heartfelt way.”
I asked if he ever picked up the guitar and sang one of his own songs for consolation, if they had that effect on him.
“Once in a while,” he said. “There’s a few—usually more of the recent ones. There are a few that I occasionally play, that I enjoy. The singing is kind of consoling, or cathartic, or soothing to me; which is something that I always wanted to be able to do: to write a song that would be a tool that I could use for myself the way I’ve been able to use other people’s songs. There’s two from my album Look into the Eyeball: ‘The Revolution’ and ‘The Great Intoxication.’”
The RevolutionAmplifiers & old guitars
Country music sung in bars
& when she sings the revolution’s near
Beauty holds the microphone
& watches as we stumble home
& she can see the revolution now
Dirt & fish & trees & houses
Smoke & hands up women’s blouses
Not like I expected it would be
Bubbles pop in every size
It’s analyzed & criticized
& beauty knows that it is almost here
Beauty goes to her address
She shuts the door and climbs the stairs
& when she sleeps the revolution grows
Beauty rests on mattress strings
Wearing just her underthings
& when she wakes the revolution’s here
& when she wakes the revolution’s here
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans were in need of comfort. To a majority of us, the unthinkable, the unanticipatable had occurred with the sudden, coordinated set of surprise attacks on U.S. soil. It wasn’t just our national pride that was injured, but our very sense of safety and security. Many commentators noted that interviews taken with Americans on the street over the few weeks immediately following the attacks were notable for this profound sense of injury, and also for a relative lack of aggressive feelings of wanting to retaliate—those feelings of a militaristic nature came only later, and (arguably) as a result of political rhetoric from the White House. During the initial aftermath, radio and television stations, train stations and bus depots, and many public places began to pipe music to Americans. And what did they play? Not the battle-tinged refrains of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but a song written by an immigrant in 1918, near the end of World War I, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” “That song spontaneously became our de facto national anthem,” says Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, a spiritual leader in Los Angeles, “at a time when people were looking for something with which to express themselves, and to bond. It’s amazing—the capacity of that simple melody to unite the country in a way that was both comforting and brought strength—it crossed all divides.”
My friend Amy was diagnosed with a brain tumor a few months ago and is now undergoing radiation therapy. Every day she has to report to the hospital and lie perfectly still for an hour, with a Hannibal Lecter-style titanium mask bolted to her head to prevent even the slightest movement that could cause the proton density beams to miss their mark. It is a very uncomfortable and frightening experience
for her. The neurosurgeon who is treating her told her to bring in music every day to the treatment sessions because he knew, based on published research, it helps to relieve anxiety and reduce the painful effects of the procedure. Amy brought in Sting’s The Dream of the Blue Turtles for her first session, and Nothing Like the Sun for the second one. I doubt Sting ever imagined his masterpieces being used in this context, but it has transformed for Amy what could have been a nausea-filled, adrenaline-toxic ordeal into a tolerable if not somewhat aesthetic experience.
Country music lyrics often tell of a love gone bad, or of Hank Williams’s now iconic “cheatin’ heart.” So much of recovery is knowing we’re not alone and that we’re understood. And good music, like good poetry, can elevate a story to give it a sense of the universal, of something larger than we or our own problems are. Art can move us so because it helps to connect us to higher truths, to a sense of being part of a global community—in short, to not being alone. And that is what comfort songs are all about.
While I was dining with Joni Mitchell at an outdoor restaurant once, two women in their late forties approached us, recognizing her. “We just wanted to thank you,” they said, apologizing for interrupting her meal. “We had a really hard time getting through our twenties. This was the 1970s,” they explained. “We listened to your album Blue and it made us feel better. Before Prozac there was you!”
When we are sad, many of us turn to sad music. Why would that be? On the surface of things, you might expect that sad people would be uplifted by happy music. But this is not what research shows. Prolactin, a tranquilizing hormone, is released when we’re sad. Sorrow does have an evolutionary purpose, which is to help us conserve energy and reorient our priorities for the future after a traumatic event. Prolactin is released after orgasm, after birth, and during lactation in females. A chemical analysis of tears reveals that prolactin is not always present in tears—it is not released in tears of lubrication of the eye, or when the eye is irritated, or in tears of joy; it is only released in tears of sorrow. David Huron suggests that sad music allows us to “trick ” our brain into releasing prolactin in response to the safe or imaginary sorrow induced by the music, and the prolactin then turns around our mood.
And aside from the neurochemical story, there is a more psychological or behavioral explanation for why we find sad music consoling. When people feel sad or suffer from clinical depression, they often feel alone, cut off from other people. They feel as though no one understands them. Happy music can be especially irritating because it makes them feel even more alone, less understood. I now know that my boss at Sambo’s, Victor, was probably suffering from clinical depression, and took out his sense of powerlessness on those who were weaker then he. The upbeat, happy song of Tony Orlando and Dawn was enough to make him snap in this condition. When we are sad and hear a sad song, we typically find it comforting. “Basically, there are now two of you at the edge of the cliff,” says Cambridge University music professor Ian Cross. “This person understands me. This person knows what I feel like.” That connection—even to a stranger—helps the process of recovery, for so much of getting better seems to rely on feeling understood—one of the reasons why talk therapy is so successful in cases of depression. In addition, the depressed person reasons, this person who went through what I went through lived through it; he recovered and can now talk about it. Moreover, the singer turned that experience into a beautiful work of art.
The blues may be the ultimate comfort song in Western society during the last hundred years. The “blues” technically refers to a type of chord progression, in its simplest form what musicians call I-IV-V7 (pronounced “one, four, five-seven”) and the many variations and reharmonizations of this basic progression, typically done in twelve- or sixteen-bar phrases (hence the term “twelve-bar-blues”). The lyrical content to this chord progression can be anything, from the Beach Boys praising the beauty of their local beaches and babes (“California Girls”), Chuck Berry paying homage to an especially skillful guitarist (“Johnny B. Goode”), or Steely Dan exploring Eastern enlightenment through the Buddha (“Bodhisattva”). But the prototypical lyric is about someone who has had hard luck, been done wrong by life and circumstance, and this is what makes the songs comforting—the idea described above that sad people are so often made to feel better by sad music.
“Going Down Slow” written by St. Louis Jimmy Oden (and performed by Howlin’ Wolf, the Animals, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and Jeff Beck with Tom Jones, among many others) is one of the thousands and thousands of amazing blues songs that have been a cultural legacy of black America throughout the twentieth century and beyond. It is the song of a dying man, looking back on his life, asking for his mother to come to his deathbed. It is heart-wrenching and bittersweet. The Jeff Beck version is one of the most powerful blues performances I’ve ever heard. Tom Jones trades in his normal sexy, confident swagger and inhabits the role of the luckless and life-scarred vagabond, his voice all but unrecognizable, dripping with despair and misery. Beck—widely regarded as among the top five guitar players alive today—plays what may be one of the most powerfully emotional electric guitar solos ever recorded. I played this last week for Sandy Pearlman, producer of Blue Öyster Cult and the Clash. Sitting in my car as we sped down the Trans-Canada Highway, he closed his eyes and smiled with every new note that Beck played. After the first vocal line, as Beck began to play his “call-and-response” guitar fills, Pearlman beamed and said, “Now there is a guy who understands everything about the cognitive neuroscience of emotion and music! He knows just what to play to put goose bumps on the hair that is standing up on the back of my neck!”
A sad song brings us through stages of feeling understood, feeling less alone in the world, hopeful that if someone else recovered so will we, and we feel ultimately inspired that the sad experience led to something aesthetically pleasing. For people who were currently sad at the Waldport Lodge that night, Étienne showed them hope. For those who were over their sadness, Étienne reminded them of how far they had come, having successfully traded despair for at least a temporary peace until the next sad episode might appear.
CHAPTER 5
Knowledge or “I Need to Know”
I came to academia late—I didn’t even get my B.A. until I was well into my thirties—but I had known Ian Cross’s name many years before we first met, principally from two important books he co-edited on musical structure and from articles on the cognitive representations of musical form. The field of music cognition is relatively small; there are probably only two hundred and fifty people in the world who would consider it their specialty. Contrast this with a field like neuroscience, which draws 30,000 attendees to its annual conference in the United States alone. Most university psychology and music departments don’t have anyone doing music cognition, and those that do rarely have more than one. This makes the annual meetings of the three main societies (the North American, the European, and the Pan-Asian) a big deal—it is an opportunity for people in the field to meet and learn about the latest findings, to resolve scientific controversies, and to schmooze.
In graduate school I completed some new work on absolute pitch, and I presented it at the European conference one year to get feedback on it before sending it out for publication. Research scientists are famously intolerant of logical arguments or experimental designs that are flawed, or young researchers who make claims that are not fully supported by the data. This is trial by fire for a student, but there is no better training. Attendees may shoot your work full of holes, but in the end if you are able to plug up the holes, the paper becomes stronger. As my doctoral advisor, Mike Posner, counseled me, it’s better to know before the paper is published if there are any flaws; printing retractions is embarrassing and career-stopping.
On the first morning of the conference I came down for breakfast and sat at a large round Formica table with some other students whom I had met on the bus ride in—two of them were Ian’s students. They were a friendly
bunch, curious to know about my background and about the paper I was going to give, what graduate school was like in America, if I had ever met a Hollywood actor (of course! America is crawling with them!), what bands I liked to listen to. Ian came in later, wearing a sharply pressed suit, and, to my surprise, sat down at the table with us students. I had assumed that meals at the conference would be similar to my family’s Thanksgiving dinners, where there were separate tables for the adults and the children. (And where, no matter how old I became, I still was relegated to the children’s table because my parents’ generation were still filling up the adult table. Last Thanksgiving several of us second-generation family members teetered uncomfortably on half-sized, low chairs at a correspondingly low table—the same chairs we’ve been sitting in for forty years.)
Ian introduced himself to everyone and struck up conversations with us all. He had himself done some work on absolute pitch and so was looking forward to my talk, he said. How often do professors go out of their way to get to know students like this? (Not often!) My first impression of Ian was of his generosity, and his indifference to social rank. We had another thing besides absolute pitch research in common: Ian was a guitarist, and although he played classical guitar and I played blues, we both had spent our lives listening to each other’s favorite music and understood it. That night after dinner, some of the attendees took turns taking the stage to play music for the group. Ian insisted that I borrow his classical guitar to play something for everyone, and so I sang and played a song I had just taught myself that month, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy.” Mine was the only nonclassical contribution to the evening, but everyone seemed to be having a good time. To this day, I still run into people from that conference who remember me as “that guy who played Stevie Ray Vaughan.” I’ve known Ian fifteen years now and he continues to astonish me with his clarity of thought, his scholarship, and his insights into music cognition. Over the past ten years, Ian has written a number of papers on the evolutionary origins of music, and they have become influential in the field.
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Page 13